Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal

Alienation, Participation, and Modernity

Shannon L. Mariotti

Publication Year: 2010

Best known for his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond in Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau is often considered a recluse who emerged from solitude only occasionally to take a stand on the issues of his day. In Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal, Shannon L. Mariotti explores Thoreau’s nature writings to offer a new way of understanding the unique politics of the so-called hermit of Walden Pond. Drawing imaginatively from the twentieth-century German social theorist Theodor W. Adorno, she shows how withdrawal from the public sphere can paradoxically be a valuable part of democratic politics. Separated by time, space, and context, Thoreau and Adorno share a common belief that critical inquiry is essential to democracy but threatened by modern society. While walking, huckleberrying, and picking wild apples, Thoreau tries to recover the capacities for independent perception and thought that are blunted by “Main Street,” conventional society, and the rapidly industrializing world that surrounded him. Adorno’s thoughts on particularity and the microscopic gaze he employs to work against the alienated experience of modernity help us better understand the value of Thoreau’s excursions into nature. Reading Thoreau with Adorno, we see how periodic withdrawals from public spaces are not necessarily apolitical or apathetic but can revitalize our capacity for the critical thought that truly defines democracy. In graceful, readable prose, Mariotti reintroduces us to a celebrated American thinker, offers new insights on Adorno, and highlights the striking common ground they share. Their provocative and challenging ideas, she shows, still hold lessons on how we can be responsible citizens in a society that often discourages original, critical analysis of public issues.

Contents

Acknowledgments

I am very happy to have this opportunity to publicly acknowledge those who
have helped bring this project to fruition. First, I would like to thank the community
of people in Ithaca, New York, at Cornell University, who supported
this project in its initial stages. My advisors, Anna Marie Smith, Susan Buck-Morss, Jason Frank, and Isaac Kramnick, had early faith in my sense that there
were important sympathies ...

Preface: Reclaiming Spaces of Withdrawal for Democratic Politics

Theodor W. Adorno was a German intellectual, one of the chief architects of the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School, as the thinkers associated with the Institute for Social Research were called. He was also part Jewish, escaping“by accident” from his homeland during the Nazi years.1 Adorno left Germany for England in 1934, moved to New York in 1938, then Los Angeles in 1941. He ...

Introduction: Reading Thoreau with Adorno

Historically, Henry David Thoreau has been a problematic figure for students
of politics.1 At best, he has been read as a marginal member of the political
theory canon known for the stinging critiques of American politics we see in
his essay on civil disobedience. At worst, Thoreau has been maligned as a misanthropic
and excessively withdrawn hermit ...

Part 1 - Two Interlocutors for Thoreau: Adorno and Emerson

In Negative Dialectics, Adorno tells us to let our thought yield to the object, to
focus our attention on the object, not on its category.1 If we would focus on particular
objects and try to hear their dissonant speech, they would help us develop
a critique of the illusory harmonies of the logics of modern capitalist society.
If we could see in this way, new critical possibilities ...

The passages above portray Thoreau as a somewhat annoying younger brother,
struggling in vain to keep up with Emerson, fingers probing into the older “mystagogue’s”
pockets to steal his ideas.1 Thoreau has often been interpreted as a
poor imitation of his older, more worldly Concord neighbor: younger, more
outdoorsy, perhaps, but cut from the same basic mold. Thoreau’s writings are ...

Part 2 - Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal

3 Man as Machine: Thoreau and Modern Alienation

When Emerson and Thoreau are compared, Emerson is typically described as
a pillar of society who took an active part in the political and social issues of his
era while Thoreau is most remembered for his solitary sojourn in a cabin on
the shores of Walden Pond. In his own time and even today, Thoreau has been
criticized for not being worldly ...

4 Huckleberrying toward Democracy: Thoreau’s Practices of Withdrawal

In his book The Senses of Walden, Stanley Cavell reads Walden word by word, sentence
by sentence. His goal is to unravel the layers of meaning and decipher
some of the mysteries of Thoreau’s excursionary, metaphorical, and allegorical
style: “My opening hypothesis is that this book is perfectly complete, that it
means in every word it says, and that it is fully sensible of its mysteries and fully
open about them.” In parsing the words ...

5 Traveling Away from Home: Thoreau’s Spaces of Withdrawal

Robert Frost’s poem “The Death of a Hired Man” poignantly captures an enduring
image of the way we typically imagine home.1 Here, Silas, a former employee
with a less than stellar track record as a worker returns to the farm of
Warren and Mary, where he is found “Huddled against the barn-door fast
asleep / A miserable sight, and frightening, too.”2 Mary says that Silas has
“come home to die,” which raises the question ...

Conclusion: Alienation and the Anti-Foundationalist Foundation of the Self

Writing independently, separated by time and space, Thoreau and Adorno
enter into a kind of fellowship in exploring the experience of alienation in
modernity and the politics of withdrawal we might enact to work against that
alienation. In this way, Thoreau becomes the kind of friend Adorno would
have especially valued. As Susan Buck-Morss notes, Adorno loved to discover
sympathetic criticisms with writers in other spaces and times and thought ...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.